Now you can pay £49 for something that many other sites offer as part of their standard service for free. Just what I've always wanted!

Amazon is good for books but it's still cheaper to buy them from the US with the exchange rate and pay the extra delivery because there's no import duties on books. Games and DVDs etc. are sometimes decent their if you buy through the Amazon marketplace but they usually charge £2 postage and aren't covered by this and most their other items tend to be large one off buys - not something that's covered by this or that you would buy regularly enough to justify it.

It's still best to get games and hardware etc. from places like shopto.net at the end of the day who undercut from anything between £5 and £20 on games and offer free next day delivery.

I may have missed something here, but what's the difference between the "free" next day delivery you get included with Amazon Prime, and the option to upgrade to Express delivery for £4.49?

As I see it, one is free and your stuff comes the next day, the other costs £4.49 and your stuff comes before 1pm the next day.

I know which I'd go for.

he was the leader of the rainforestbots, they would transform from rainforest into pasture for cattle to supply burger franchises, or open cast mining. they were not very popular as a childrens cartoon though

I'd opened several reg articles in tabs, when I closed the previous tab and this article opened at that precise moment I got an email from amazon about it!

Have they gone as far as spywaring there visitors browsers to send there user related ads instead of just profiling there purchases and page views!

/runs off to for an adaware scan...

Does it include Northern Ireland?

Unless you're doing all your online shopping on 23rd December, I'm not sure I see the point.

Which is it ?

It's annual...

I can't really see the point either, if you buy a lot of stuff and really need it quick then great, but overall... err.... i suppose it's handy if you frequently buy one CD at a time and prefer the protection of Amazon than the marketplace but you'd need to buy a few CD's, one at a time, to make the £49 back.

After 2 goes I've got an answer from Amazon Customer Service about Northern Ireland....

"We would like to bring this to your kind information that Amazon

Prime deliveries are not applicable for Norther Ireland.

The delivery options available for Norther Ireland are Airmail

delivery and Priority Express delivery."

Bet they wouldn't have minded taking the £49 off me if I'd applied mind you, especially as they'd sent me an invite mail knowing my address perfectly well.

Next I'll ask them if they offer customer service in English or not...

. . . you have to put up with the p¡ss-poor "Home Delivery Network Ltd" as the courier, which as even a cursory googling will attest isn't even worth fifty PENCE a year, let alone fifty QUID.

I have spent THOUSANDS with Amazon over the years, and have been utterly frustrated by their total brick wall responses to my efforts to get my items shipped by Royal Mail, rather than this useless shower of incompetents.

Amazon's once industry-leading customer service has taken a dive from which it may never recover over this HNDL business.

Amazon prime in Germany (amazon.de) is only €29, or about 20 quid. Someone's taking the p**s.

Your comment could have been written by me. After many years and many thousands of pounds of happy Amazon trading I can no longer use them because they now use HDNL.

Unlike Royal Mail, HDNL require a signature which I can never give and they have no local depot either (hate to think what their CO2 footprint might be) so I can't pickup either. Result: any package I order fails repeated delivery attempts and then gets returned.

Amazon must be losing a lot of custom over this.